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rodhunt's review
challenging
dark
informative
medium-paced
4.5
A chilling portrayal of the wars of occupation in Northern Australia that many Australians don’t want to acknowledge or learn about. The great Australian silence.
stelhan's review
4.0
My most anticipated book from last year. Horrifying but essential, especially for white Australians with settler ancestors
leemac027's review
dark
emotional
informative
sad
slow-paced
3.0
This is a very detailed and well researched account of an important part of our country's history and the family history related to David Marr. Depending how many generations each reader's family extends back into this country, it is our collective history as well.
Having said that, I as with a number of others, did find it a slog to get through. It is hard to balance the amount of detail to keep the reader engaged while relating the horrific details and the ongoing impact of colonialisation.
David Marr has been careful to seek guidance from First Nations Peoples and acknowledges this history is theirs to tell. He tells the story of his family from his perspective and with respect.
It is a history that needs to be told and often.
Having said that, I as with a number of others, did find it a slog to get through. It is hard to balance the amount of detail to keep the reader engaged while relating the horrific details and the ongoing impact of colonialisation.
David Marr has been careful to seek guidance from First Nations Peoples and acknowledges this history is theirs to tell. He tells the story of his family from his perspective and with respect.
It is a history that needs to be told and often.
ladykitsugo's review
5.0
((My copy of Killing For Countey was an uncorrected version of book))
This is a book a book that carries weight. The weight of our history and the blood and destruction that was left behind in its wake. In the name of wealth and expansion, did this begin, and it's a story not yet done as Australians still learn to face stories such as the Urh's. To those who wish to delve into the horrors and want to face this history, to those who can confront what was done, this is a highly recommended book. I would say necessary to those who want to confront the black stains of Australian history. But this is how i feel, as this and many other parts of my countrys history linger in my mind.
This is a book a book that carries weight. The weight of our history and the blood and destruction that was left behind in its wake. In the name of wealth and expansion, did this begin, and it's a story not yet done as Australians still learn to face stories such as the Urh's. To those who wish to delve into the horrors and want to face this history, to those who can confront what was done, this is a highly recommended book. I would say necessary to those who want to confront the black stains of Australian history. But this is how i feel, as this and many other parts of my countrys history linger in my mind.
tasmanian_bibliophile's review
4.5
‘We will never know how many died at the hands of the Native Police.’
Some years ago, David Marr learned that his great-great-grandfather Reginald Charles Uhr (1844-1888) had served as an officer with the Native Police Force, as had his younger brother Wentworth D’Arcy Uhr (1845-1907). Given that the role of the Native Police Force was to hunt and kill Aboriginal people in 19th and early 20th century Australia, Mr Marr was shocked. He wrote:
‘It embarrasses me now to have been reporting race and politics in this country for so long without it ever crossing my mind that my family might have played a part in the frontier wars. My blindness was so Australian.’
My own Australian blindness feels worse. Until I read this book, I had no understanding of who the Native Police were and what their role was. The Australian history I was taught (in Tasmania in the 1960s and early 1970s) focussed on European settlement and achievements. There were, we were taught, no longer any Tasmanian Aborigines. And, given this absolute (albeit incorrect) statement, we were taught nothing about either pre-European history or any significant detail about the impact of European settlement.
But I have digressed. Mr Marr decided to investigate this aspect of his family history. He begins with the life of Richard Jones (1786-1852) who arrived in Sydney in 1809. Mr Jones became a successful merchant and grazier and encouraged his wife’s relatives to come to Sydney. Edmund Uhr (1815-1874) migrated to Sydney during the 1830s. Reg and D’Arcy were two of his sons.
Through the lives of these four men, we see how Australia was transformed during the 19th century. And as Australia transformed, as European settlers expanded their businesses and landholdings, Aboriginal people were dispossessed and killed. Having set the scene in the first part of the book, Mr Marr provides uncomfortable detail of how the Native Police Forces were established in Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland, and of more than 70 episodes of killing Aboriginal people.
‘The Native Police survived so long because they did their job so well. ‘
This is not an easy book to read. I wonder how many of us reading this book also had family members who were part of the Native Police Forces. Every governor who arrived in Australia was given instructions to protect the native people. The leases given to squatters included clauses to enable Aboriginal people to hunt, fish and maintain their traditional ways on their lands. But far as the squatters were concerned, Aboriginal people were in the way. They competed with sheep for land and water, and generally the ‘protections’ were worthless.
‘Despite the lives ruined and blood spilt, slavery and kidnapping were everywhere and officially tolerated in Queensland.’
We Australians don’t like acknowledging these aspects of the past. Many of us either pretend that they didn’t happen (or are exaggerated) or that the actions taken by our ancestors were (somehow) justified.
As Mr Marr writes: ‘We can be proud of our families for things done generations ago. We can also be ashamed. I feel no guilt for what Reg did.’
I think this is the key. Feeling ashamed is not the same as feeling guilty. Feeling ashamed can enable us to focus on change whereas feeling guilty often leads to a kind of belligerent defensiveness. We cannot ignore our history (although we seem to have tried hard to do just that), but we should be capable of learning from it.
‘The maths is indisputable: we each have sixteen great-grandparents. Reg Uhr was one of mine.’
A confronting and uncomfortable look at the past. We should all read it.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
archytas's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
3.5
In his acknowledgements David Marr is at his absolute best quoting friend Mary Vallentine, with: "David, none of us has another book in you".
You can certainly see why he might have been hard company writing this book, which details the terribly decisions of Marr's ancestors (and friends) with the same kind of relentless focus that they brought to Australia's frontier massacres. The book is exhaustive, and occasionally feels so, despite Marr's superb wit (one figure's situation is summarised simply with "The family called him in their letters Poor John". And nobody is entirely engaging when talking about their own family's history.
Marr is not simply summarising a family's (mostly mis-)deeds, here, however. He unpicks a story of capitalist greed, morals bendable in all directions to serve profit, incompetance protected by family, and unabated expansion of taken territory, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, but never, ever, reversing. This is where the book is the most significant for me, in detailing not deeds of just bad people, but systems that reward genocide, and theft of a continent for the enrichment of a few. Marr is clearly fascinated by the figure of Richard Jones, and while the beats of Sydney colony history may be familiar to many, they take on new life through the lens of this singular figure, who could condemn 'unnecessary' killings while authorising his own, assumedly necessary, ones. Jones' breathtaking hypocrisy - no doubt recognisable to Marr from his studies of various politicians - matters because it becomes too easy in our day and time to assume someone who says the right things will also do them under pressure. But pressure wins so often.
The second half of the book focuses on the notorious native police units of Queensland, which killed close tens of thousands of people (current estimates are at 41,000) over 30-40 years. Marr focuses on two brothers, looking at how the units operated and documenting the tally of events.
At times, the book can feel like a litany of similar events, with changing characters and locale, but depressingly similar actions and outcomes. It is hard to fault this - part of the point is that killings were depressingly routine.
Marr notes in his afterward that colonialism's story are for settlers to tell, and here he certainly delivers. As with any book about the frontier wars, it is shocking how openly discussed this was in the 19th Century, and then how totally purged it became in the 20th. That means lots of rich resources for historians to understand,and no excuses for us not to wrestle with what this collective trauma and destruction might have left us with.
Marr comments in the afterword ""I have been asked how I could bear to write this book. It is an act of atonement, of penance by storytelling. But I wasn’t wallowing in my own shame. None of us are free of this past. ... My links to the Uhr brothers made the obligation to come to grips with this past personal. For a man of my trade, the outcome was obvious – I had to write their story." None of bear responsibility for the actions of others. But all of us bear responsibility for deciding how to respond to the world they left us, and the individual inheritances we all got from this. A starting point is to document what that history actually was.
You can certainly see why he might have been hard company writing this book, which details the terribly decisions of Marr's ancestors (and friends) with the same kind of relentless focus that they brought to Australia's frontier massacres. The book is exhaustive, and occasionally feels so, despite Marr's superb wit (one figure's situation is summarised simply with "The family called him in their letters Poor John". And nobody is entirely engaging when talking about their own family's history.
Marr is not simply summarising a family's (mostly mis-)deeds, here, however. He unpicks a story of capitalist greed, morals bendable in all directions to serve profit, incompetance protected by family, and unabated expansion of taken territory, sometimes slow, sometimes rapid, but never, ever, reversing. This is where the book is the most significant for me, in detailing not deeds of just bad people, but systems that reward genocide, and theft of a continent for the enrichment of a few. Marr is clearly fascinated by the figure of Richard Jones, and while the beats of Sydney colony history may be familiar to many, they take on new life through the lens of this singular figure, who could condemn 'unnecessary' killings while authorising his own, assumedly necessary, ones. Jones' breathtaking hypocrisy - no doubt recognisable to Marr from his studies of various politicians - matters because it becomes too easy in our day and time to assume someone who says the right things will also do them under pressure. But pressure wins so often.
The second half of the book focuses on the notorious native police units of Queensland, which killed close tens of thousands of people (current estimates are at 41,000) over 30-40 years. Marr focuses on two brothers, looking at how the units operated and documenting the tally of events.
At times, the book can feel like a litany of similar events, with changing characters and locale, but depressingly similar actions and outcomes. It is hard to fault this - part of the point is that killings were depressingly routine.
Marr notes in his afterward that colonialism's story are for settlers to tell, and here he certainly delivers. As with any book about the frontier wars, it is shocking how openly discussed this was in the 19th Century, and then how totally purged it became in the 20th. That means lots of rich resources for historians to understand,and no excuses for us not to wrestle with what this collective trauma and destruction might have left us with.
Marr comments in the afterword ""I have been asked how I could bear to write this book. It is an act of atonement, of penance by storytelling. But I wasn’t wallowing in my own shame. None of us are free of this past. ... My links to the Uhr brothers made the obligation to come to grips with this past personal. For a man of my trade, the outcome was obvious – I had to write their story." None of bear responsibility for the actions of others. But all of us bear responsibility for deciding how to respond to the world they left us, and the individual inheritances we all got from this. A starting point is to document what that history actually was.
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